Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 09:29:47 -0400 (EDT) From: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> To: Chuck Robey <chuckr@picnic.mat.net> Cc: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>, FreeBSD-Alpha <alpha@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: PC164SX/booting the floppy Message-ID: <14273.18977.894347.713070@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9908230007150.49952-100000@picnic.mat.net> References: <199908230400.VAA00975@dingo.cdrom.com> <Pine.BSF.4.10.9908230007150.49952-100000@picnic.mat.net>
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Chuck Robey writes: > On Sun, 22 Aug 1999, Mike Smith wrote: > > > You said you found the option to swap it to the SRM console. If that > > worked, you should have a command prompt. If not, then you need to get > > the bits out of my alpha archive on www.freebsd.org and flash the SRM > > firmware into your machine. > > The GUI gave me an option to change to the SRM console with no command > line appearing. Should that have happened? Here's what I did: > > I have a screen before me, entitled "AlphaBIOS Setup". I chose an > option labelled "CMOS Setup". In that subscreen, the 5th and last > option is "Console Selection", and the area for entry is a pulldown > option list, of which one is "Digital UNIX Console (SRM)". I chose > that, no command line involved. Didn't need to use the floppy that I'd > already downloaded and prepared to use. > > When I let the boot go without any intervention, the GUI disappears, the > screen *does* go to black and white, but it only gives me an up/down > arrow option to choose the operating system to start, and the only > system listed is "Windows NT Workstation Version 4.00" You're trapped in the AlphaBios console. You need to switch to the SRM console for FreeBSD to work. To do this, you need to load the SRM console into the machine. Place http://www.freebsd.org/~msmith/alpha/pc164sx/fwupdate.exe and http://www.freebsd.org/~msmith/alpha/pc164sx/sx164srm.rom onto a FAT formated floppy & put that floppy in the drive. I'm a little bit fuzzy, on the details (its been a few months since I did this, perhaps somebody with more recent experience could chime in?), but you need to coerce the system into loading the new firmware from the floppy. There should be an 'Update AlphaBios" entry somewhere in the AlphaBios menu which you need to select. After it has loaded the firmware, you'll need to reset or powercycle the box. At this point you should be in the SRM console & should be greeted with prompt which looks like this ">>>". From here, say 'boot dva0' to boot the floppy. Cheers, Drew ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andrew Gallatin, Sr Systems Programmer http://www.cs.duke.edu/~gallatin Duke University Email: gallatin@cs.duke.edu Department of Computer Science Phone: (919) 660-6590 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
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